Burning Time (21 page)

“I’ve been telling Elinor Zing every day for more than a week that we want to do this film, and now you say you’re not sure you do. How much longer do you think I can hold them off? I can’t hold them off.” She stopped and turned to Emma. “Are you listening to me?”

Emma had her eye on the street behind her.

“What’s the matter with you?” Ronnie demanded fiercely.

“Nothing.” Emma shook her head, looking puzzled. “It’s weird.”

“You know what Elinor told me? She said they like you
very much, but just between us, she doesn’t think Jack and Albert have a long attention span.”

Emma took a few steps forward and then turned around again, frowning.

“What
is
the matter with you?”

“I don’t know. I have the strangest feeling.…”

“Emma, look at me. Elinor told me not to jerk them around. She told me to tell you that no one who turns Jack down gets a second chance.”

Emma studied the array of people behind Ronnie on Sixth Avenue. Nothing out of the ordinary. The usual mix of business people and street people. There was a crowd around two huge black men playing three-card monte.

“I told her you
adore
Jack,” Ronnie went on. “I said you’re dying to work with him. What are you looking at?”

“I told you, I have a funny feeling someone is—Oh, forget it.” She shook her head.

“So Elinor said, ‘What more could anyone want?’ She could tell you liked Michael. God!
Anybody
would kill to work with him. I told her
you
would kill to work with him. You’re crazy about him, aren’t you? Can you imagine being with him for six weeks in a small hick southern town, huh?”

“I liked him,” Emma admitted. “I liked him a lot.”

“So she wanted to know what the trouble was and I couldn’t think of a thing. So she, I don’t know how, she got the idea you wanted more money.”

“Jesus,” Emma muttered.

“So she said she’d call me today and see if they can do any better.” Ronnie pointed to her watch angrily. “Look at this. You waited too long, you asked for too much, and now they may not want you anymore. Do you think she called me back? Huh? Do you? No. She did
not
call me back.”

“It’s only twelve-thirty,” Emma muttered. “It’s still early in California.”

“Yeah, but they may be talking to other people. I could just kill you. Hey, where are you going?” Ronnie protested. “I have a reservation at the Tea Room. Don’t you want to be
seen?”

Emma had continued up Sixth Avenue and was heading toward the park.

Ronnie huffed after her. “Speak to me,” she demanded. “You finally got what we wanted, and now you’re teetering on the edge of losing it. What the fuck’s the matter with you?”

Ronnie stopped in the middle of the sidewalk by Café De La Paix and planted herself in Emma’s path. Her face was red and angry. “Don’t do this to me.”

“You’re my agent. You’re supposed to represent my best interests,” Emma said, “not just yours.”

“But mine
is
yours,” Ronnie insisted.

“Then you’ll understand it isn’t so simple.” Emma started walking again.

“Oh, for God’s sake, stop. I can’t walk anymore. Where do you think you’re going?” Ronnie protested helplessly.

“I’m going into the park. I don’t want to eat. I want to sit on that bench over there in the sun.” Where she could see the people around her. She started to cross with the light.

Ronnie plunged after her, puffing with the effort of keeping up. “You’re making me crazy,” she muttered.

“I can’t
make
you crazy.” Emma replied sharply, because it was a sore point. She wasn’t exactly sure whether she could make someone crazy or not. Jason said she could do something that could trigger a crazy reaction. And now he was out of town. But she had a very strong feeling that he was still around. It was extremely unnerving.

“Look, I may be thwarting and frustrating you, but you’re already crazy.”

“Don’t give me that shrink shit!” Ronnie cried. “I’m sick of that shrink shit. Just talk normal.”

Emma made for the newly painted green bench just inside the park wall. It had no homeless person on it, no bird droppings. And just at that moment it was in the sun. Emma sat, and Ronnie collapsed next to her. Ronnie’s red-and-blue silk skirt rose like a tent as she sat down, then gently deflated around her.

“You’re already crazy,” Emma repeated.

“Maybe,” Ronnie said, more gently. “Maybe I am, but I know a few things, and you’re making a big mistake here. What’s going on with you?”

Emma paused for a long time. “Maybe I don’t want to change my life,” she said, starting cautiously. “Being so—public isn’t all terrific.”

“What are you talking about? Of course it’s terrific.”

“Something’s happening, Ronnie.”

Ronnie scowled. “What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been getting … letters.” Emma’s lips trembled.

“So? Everybody gets letters. It’s part of the game. You get famous, you get letters. Forget it. Let’s go have lunch. You’ll feel better.” Ronnie stood up.

Emma’s face was white. “Not like these. It’s somebody who knows me.”

“How do you know?” Ronnie was irritated again.

“How do I
know?
He talks about things that happened in high school. I was the ghost in
Blithe Spirit
. He knows what my costume looked like. He talks about how pure I was. There was an incident in my senior year with the captain of the football team.…”

You were the Ice Queen no one could touch you
.

“What kind of incident?” Ronnie was curious now.

Emma looked at a squirrel running up a tree. “It happened so long ago.”

“What?” Ronnie asked again.

“Oh, nothing. Just … I don’t know.”

Ronnie sighed. If Emma were a big star, then she, Ronnie, would be a big star’s agent. Other actors would come to her. She’d make a lot of money and be thin. She screwed her face up with the effort of looking for the right thing to say.

“Um, so, you’re kind of freaked by these letters.”

“It isn’t
just
the letters,” Emma said, looking at some serious scuff marks on the toe of her new shoes.
It was Jason
.

“Actors are recognized and talked to on the street all the time. They get thousands of letters. It’s the price you pay for fame.”

“What do they do?” Emma asked after a long moment.

“They don’t open the letters. Give me the go-ahead, Emma. They’re not going to wait for you forever.”

Why did you become a piece of shit?

“It’s not so easy,” Emma said. “I’m scared.”

“I don’t believe this,” Ronnie said. “What’s there to be scared of? Do the damn film. Don’t open the fucking letters. What’s so hard?”

“You don’t understand,” Emma said. Somebody knew how to scare her from the inside.

She rubbed at the scuff mark. She didn’t want to believe that she could do something that could make a person go crazy. But what if it was true? What if seeing her naked in a film made her own husband crazy?

Jason said he left town. Her parents said they saw him when he arrived last night. But she had the distinct feeling he was back. He had come back without telling her and
was following her around. She shook her head. How could that be?

Planes flew all night. That’s how it could be.

“Aw, shit. I’m going to call Elinor. So what if we leave a few thousand on the table.” Ronnie put her arm around Emma and gave her a squeeze. “Come on. Come, let’s go eat something. You’ll feel better,” she said soothingly. “Come on, Em. You know I love you.”

The words struck a chord. Emma put her hands to her face.

Ronnie leaned over, concerned. “Jesus, what’s the matter?”

They were surrounded by sunlight and springtime and the glow of a golden future. They should be eating caviar and drinking champagne in The Russian Tea Room, and Emma was crying her eyes out.

“Newton, honey. You got to do something about that dripping tap.” That was the last thing Rose said to him as he walked out the door that morning.
You got to do something about the faucet
. It left a bad taste in his mouth as he headed to work. She had been saying the same damn thing for weeks, and she knew she could get it done just as easy as he could, maybe easier.

Sometimes he couldn’t understand why she didn’t see he had something on his mind—didn’t sleep the whole night, worrying—and leave him alone about faucets.

He didn’t like got-to-dos.

If Milt got a match on that body, and it turned out to be that girl from New York, then he’d have a big got-to-do. She died in his jurisdiction. That made it his case. He couldn’t just close it up because there was no physical evidence. He’d have to investigate it. But hell, there were not really enough of them to start running around asking questions. Shit.

Newt half hoped Milt and his friend, the coroner from Twentynine Palms, would get together on this and find
the same MO on the two bodies. Then they could inform the FBI at VICAP and let them deal with it as a serial murder thing. Never mind that it was just two. More than one was good enough. Those guys had the experts and the computers. They were used to checking and cross-checking every kind of killer and every kind of bizarre twist the human mind could think of.

But even though Milt and his friend agreed there was a striking resemblance between the injuries on the chest, even though the two girls did appear to have been tortured and were found in similar circumstances, that’s all there was. They had not been murdered in the usual way. For homicides, you needed more than a body. You needed a murder weapon. You needed a place of death, some indication someone else was there.

Newton Regis certainly couldn’t go to the FBI and say he had a serial killer.
Yes, sir, and by the way, sir, the desert did it
.

Maybe the guy hadn’t worked his way up to killing them yet. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. In any case, at the moment it was some kind of sex crime thing. And they certainly didn’t have a Sex Crime Unit in Potoway Village. So Rose should understand he had a problem, if the girl Milt had on ice was the girl from New York.

Newt got in at eight and sat at his desk gloomily until ten, when Milt finally called him. They had a positive ID.

Jimmy leaned against the driver’s door of the white LeBaron. His hair had gotten quite long, and his face was lean and narrow. Even in its best moments, it was not a generous face. Now it had kind of a pinched look about it, as if he had just eaten something sour.

April knew the sour thing he had to swallow was her insistence that he come into Manhattan right away. She called him every place she could think of, and someone must have given him the message.

“What’s so urgent?” he said on the phone when he called her back.

“Hello,” she said.

“What?”

“You skipped our lunch. The least you could do is say ‘Hello, how are you, April,’ ” April said.

She had gone up to the dorm at Columbia to look for letters, and had found Connie Sagan but no letters. Connie was sure there had been no letters. She was sure Ellen hadn’t been seeing anyone since she broke up with her boyfriend, and certainly didn’t go to California with someone.
Connie was absolutely sure she would have known that.

“I guess you haven’t found her yet,” Connie said. She was the opposite of Ellen, a fat girl with a lot of pain in her face.

April shook her head. “No, I don’t have any information on that.”

She had gone back to the precinct instead of home to wait for Jimmy’s call. She was in a bad mood and didn’t care who knew it.

“Look, I’m sorry about lunch. Something came up,” Jimmy said. It didn’t sound like he was in a good mood, either.

“You haven’t called me in two weeks.” She was sitting at her desk. Everyone was out. For some reason she felt strong.

“I’ve been on a case. What’s the big deal? Are you my wife or something?”

“You have my car, Jimmy.”

“You gave me your car. You told me to drive carefully.”

“Now I want it back.”

“Huh? I’m on a case right now. You called me for that?”

“You’re off duty right now, Jimmy. Today was your day off. We were going to go to lunch. You stood me up.”

“Look, you asked
me
. I told you it wasn’t convenient. So just because I couldn’t get there you want the car back. That’s not a nice way to be.”

“Jimmy, I want the car back because I need it to get around.”

“I’m disappointed in you.”

Yes, she’d heard that before. Whenever she opened her mouth to disagree with him, he either called her a crazy woman or said he was disappointed in her. She thought
she used to be a crazy woman. Now she was a sane woman.

“You’ve changed since you’ve been Uptown,” he complained, like she was contaminated in some way because of it.

“How soon can you be here? I’m not leaving here without my car. I’ll let everyone know you have it. I want it now.”

He showed up in an hour and had to wait outside the building because there was no way he would go in and look for her. He was leaning against the car scowling when she ambled out of the building and crossed the street.

“I told you I’d be here. Why’d you have to make me wait on the street?” he grumbled.

April held out her hand for the keys.

“I kept you waiting three minutes. You kept me waiting for an hour and a quarter. You knew where I was. You could have called. Now you know what it feels like.”

His face turned red. There were some blue uniforms watching him lose face.

“Uh, get in. I’ll drive you home,” he said.

She shook her head. “I’m not going home.”

“Then I’ll take you where you’re going.”

“I thought you were on a case,” April reminded him.

“I have time to take you where you’re going.” He cocked his head at her, telling her to get in the car.

“Uh-uh. You can’t take me where I’m going, Jimmy.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re not going to the same place anymore. So we’re not seeing each other again.”